Roddick Retires

Andy Roddick announced yesterday that he was retiring from tennis, effective upon his next loss. It was Roddick’s thirtieth birthday, nine years after he won the U.S. Open at the age of twenty-one years and eight days.

The year before his victory, Roddick had lost to Pete Sampras in the quarterfinals, and had done so while wearing a visor that had his spiky hair pointing in all directions. This was not the intimidating posture a Grand Slam champion would project, his coach suggested, so Roddick returned in 2003 with a trucker hat. It was a small step up the ladder of maturity—from high-school jock to fraternity jock, say—but it worked. Roddick made the finals, and beat the capless Juan Carlos Ferrero in straight sets. America’s teen-age star was all grown up.

Roddick was, at the time, a flash of new: America had just come from a tennis generation dominated by Sampras, the quietest of champions, and late-career Andre Agassi, far removed from his Image is Everything days. When Roddick won, the torch of American tennis was officially passed to the loud kid with the trucker hats and violent service motion. He took Sampras’s serve-and-volley game, and tossed out the volleys, deciding to win by hitting his serve as hard as he could. (He still holds the record for fastest serve in U.S. Open history: one hundred and fifty-four miles per hour.) He went on to play more night matches than anyone in the brief history of Arthur Ashe Stadium, and reached four other Grand Slam finals, including Wimbledon’s in 2009, when he lost 16-14 in the fifth set to Roger Federer. “It’s not been easy after Agassi and Sampras, Courier, Chang, Connors, McEnroe,” Federer said yesterday. “It’s been hard for him as well at times. I thought he always did the best he could. That’s all you can ask from a guy.”

It has been Roddick’s luck to bear the burden of American tennis with little regular support from his countrymen, and to be constantly reminded of 2003, the lone time he fulfilled America’s outsized expectations for his career. “There’s little reminders,” Roddick said during last year’s Open. “You get the little deal on your locker that says you’re special. And then I think about 2006”—when he lost to Federer in the final—“just as much, because I was in a rough kind of career transition that summer. You guys were trying to kick me out at twenty-three, so I got just as much joy out of that kind of run to the finals as I did when I won.” Roddick somehow became a disappointment, despite holding a spot in the Top Ten for all but a handful of weeks over a period of nine years. By the late aughts, Federer had become my favorite player, but I can’t recall cheering harder against a player than I did during that Wimbledon final that Federer won; Roddick had endured so much doubt—he deserved a moment of validation.

It ended up being his last best chance at a Slam. He fell out of the Top Ten last year, and had thus far reached only the first, second, and third rounds, respectively, of this year’s slams. His body had taken a beating—“It’s got to hurt to serve one hundred and forty miles an hour for ten, twelve years,” James Blake, now the elder statesman of American tennis, said yesterday—but there had been signs of hope: A win against Federer in March that proved he could still compete with the best, and a victory earlier this month, in Atlanta.

Yet this moment was apparently coming for some time: he’d told his good friend Serena Williams of his decision late last year. “Change your mind, Andy, change your mind,” she says she said, but to no avail. At his press conference, Roddick simply announced that he was no longer committed enough to the sport to endure a full year on the tour, which confirmed suspicions that he hadn’t been committed enough for some time. He now has a Saturday morning national-radio show, a supermodel wife, and “a lot of interests in a lot of other things.” Ask anyone in tennis, and they will say that Roddick has invested nearly as much in mentoring the future stars of American tennis as he has in his own game; his affection for the sport has always been evident.

Tonight, Roddick faces the youngest player in the Top Hundred, nineteen-year-old Australian Bernard Tomic. Roddick will still be the higher ranked player on that court and should, in theory, be favored, but the Open is taking no chances. They’ve put Roddick in Arthur Ashe Stadium, at night, so that everyone who wants to can see him play his final match, if that’s what it is. He will, no doubt, remain there until the end of his career. Whether that comes tonight, on Sunday, or—heck, why not—next weekend, Roddick will get a moment to address the crowd. And if he cries, like he did in 2003, no one will blame him.